572 days

572 days.

Or 1 year, 6 months, 22 days.

OR 18 months, 22 days.

From the period between March 13th, 2019 to October 5th, 2020, I released 4  full-length albums.

It's hard for me to fathom that 2020 was already 3 years ago, because this whole pandemonium has never ended and everything has just smooshed into this miserable blur.

These albums got lost in the shuffle of 2020 and never got their moments, so I am carving out a little bit of time for them now. I made all 4 of these albums during a period I was feeling completely unfulfilled, and I just kept releasing to try to outrun those feelings.

Make Believe (March 13th, 2019)

I started Make Believe in the summer of 2017 after one of the worst experiences of my mortal existence. It was just my voice and some piano tracks, with occasional strings. The idea of doing a covers' album was overwhelming, least of all a musical theatre covers album. I used covers to tell a story. If you knew what happened, it read like a book. If you didn't, it was just a collection of pretty songs. It was such a sad project, and  finishing it did not feel like an achievement. Everything that could have gone wrong with it did!  The recording of Inside Out that made the album wasn't the one I wanted, it was just the one that survived the DAWS crash! Sometimes you just have to hit CTRL + S for the last time and be done with it! Me not having fun with it was no one's fault, and I don't blame anyone else who worked on the record for it. This was 1000000% the nature of the project, the sad impetus behind it, the sheer pressure I had put on myself to succeed.  I was left so unfulfilled by it, and then the day it came out, I lost all of the money I spent in advertising because Facebook and Instagram went down! I feel like that was just indicative of that whole experience!

I KNOW WHAT YOU DO ON THE INTERNET (October 22nd, 2019)

During the entire period I was working on Make Believe, I was still working on pop music. I was making music that was or was supposed to sound as analog as possible--I was going for the late 1980's-early-1990's sound. I experimented a lot of samples, drum machines, and loops. I got tired of working on other people, and this was the first album (outside of my song cycle) that I had done top to bottom all by myself. I was noticing in my streaming stats that were listening to my music--people I had cut off. I cannot be sure for certain of course, but I am sure no one else in their demographic and geographic range would be listening to songs that suspect are about them.  Instead of using metaphors to tell stories, I sprinkled each of the songs with clues for these people to find. If you go looking for trouble, you're sure going to find it!

The Course of Empire (June 08, 2020)

I wrote this one in a period a period of about two months? I was still feeling bad that the albums I had just made in the previous year didn't give me that "ta-DA!" feeling I craved so badly. I had no idea that went I started this that the pandemonium was going to last forever! I wanted to explore some dance music from the early-to-mid-2000's. I leaned very heavily into loops and drum machines. I remember that I had spoke to my friend Will Curry when I saw him on the MISS SAIGON tour in November of 2019, and he had asked me if I had ever thought about using "the opera stuff" for the electronic music. A  little switch went off in my head! In December of 2019, I had been introduced to the music of Allie X, and in February, she had released Cape God. I was off and running! The title of the album comes from the series of paintings of the same name by Thomas Cole. Was comparing the apocalypse to failed interpersonal relationships the best move? Maybe not. But I am not the only person who has done this! Sometimes I go back and listen to albums after they're released to try to remember something that I had done production wise that I liked or a synth I used or something. This isn't one of those albums!  There are two songs in particular that are back to back that I cannot listen to because they are too sad and too raw, R i p e and Consummation.

Sweetest Tongue, Sharpest Tooth (October 5th, 2020)

2020 was such a whacky era. I never got the classic pandemic experience of Netflix and  baking bread because I was a frontline worker. The closest I got to a pandemonium-related hobby was scouring NextDoor for Mountain Lion sightings, and then my mom and I or my sister and I driving around listening to First Wave on Sirius looking for them. Basically, it's a Dark Wave/ New Wave album about werewolves. Were you under the impression that I was "cool" in any way? Well, I am very sorry, but you're wrong. The album title comes from the poem at the end of the film The Company of Wolves, based on the book of the same name. I had rewatched The Company of Wolves for the first time in 2019, releasing that I had seen it as a child (when I absolutely should have not seen this movie, holy shit). It unlocked a lot of really primal and raw feelings, it unlocked a Pandora's box of suppressed memories. Out of the 4 albums I released in the 18th month period, I think this one felt the most complete to me. This is the one that left me with the "ta-da!!!" I had been looking for. I think part of that was it was the least sad. That whole period of my life between 2017 (and even into 2015) until like 2020-2021 was so SAD. A lot of these songs that were based on sad things were turned into this big 80's werewolf dance party.

I released an EP in November of 2021 and another album in  June of 2022, but  I definitely considered that 18 month intense period over, and there was definitely a shift in tone in the music and themes. I am excited for the next era.